Mr. Roboto – Part 1

Article was written on 11th march 2015

As of today, I declare my personal robot creation progress to have been started. As the whole actual project had started already a week ago when I did not have this blog running, I’ll be writing a small summary of things what I am doing.

Project

To create a moving, talking and interactive robot with basic learning intelligence, facial and object recognition, location awareness as well as wireless communication with local wireless network and with the internet. Robot will be made entirely from the scratch and no ready-made robot-targeted parts will be used.

Operation area

Robot will be limited moving range inside of our house on the first floor. Robot will be battery-powered with the planned automated charging capabilities on the future.

Hardware overview

Robot control circuit will be Raspberry Pi B (512mb) model, with attached motor controller to GPIO, ultrasonic distance radar, HD webcam for facial and object recognition as well as QR code image detection for location awareness. Two electric motors will be used for movement, light plastic body for holding all together, separate battery for controller and for the engines as well as USB WIFI-stick for communication with the house servers and the internet.

Software overview

Robot will be programmed in the Rasbian environment using combination of the shellscripts, python, PHP and of course, crontab.

What I want it to do (at first)

Independent navigation around the house with location awareness. Collision avoiding and navigating around obstacles. Reporting to the local network of location and of operating situation.

What I want it to do (if all goes well)

facial recognition of the family members, text-to-speech greetings, mail and text message reporting and calendar reporting.

What I want it to do (if project really goes with the flow)

Simple script based AI with learning capabilities, Dog-like behavior with owner following and warning, house guarding while house is empty and of course, barking to strangers.